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Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000 (arstechnica.com)
Mobile advertising firm InMobi will be paying a fine of $950,000 and revamp its services to resolve federal regulators' claims that it deceptively tracked locations of hundreds of millions of people, including children. Ars Technica reports:The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users' ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn't given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users. Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a "geocorder" database to infer the phone user's latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn't provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone's dedicated location feature.
Nice to know the courts value our privacy so dearly!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
$960k is peanuts for them.This worked out great. Enough to do it again once the dust settles.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
, you don't get to see/feel what happens when you drop the soap. It's about time these criminals did time.
The corporation didn't make the decision to illegally perform these actions, people did. Furthermore, they were very likely to be senior fuckwits. Enough is enough. Send them to jail as if they social engineered your personal details. Multiply that jail time by the number of people they affected. The board, the primary shareholders, and the management that enforced this need to be hauled in front of judges - now!
Did you miss that it said "Android and iOS" in the summary? Mind you, I use and love iOS, but throwing Android under the bus as if this problem is unique to them makes no sense here.
Yeah, but this case is actively working against Google's interests and evading Apple's interests.
Google wants to be the all-knowing oracle that gets maximum return to actual advertisers without revealing how their all-seeing-vision works. The ultimate middle-man between advertisers and advertisees (more often known as "victims"). This specific advertiser is bypassing Google's part and collecting the data themselves, which makes Google upset.
Apple wants to be the omnipotent tyrant of the various iThingies. An advertiser bypassing their controls is an insult to their sovereignty.
Microsoft was unaffected because for the first time in forever, Microsoft has a product that isn't a market-leading target for malicious actors. This makes certain division leads struggle between euphoria and suicidal depression.
100M users tracked? $950k is insultingly low.
TO cut down on advertising I changed my default Android browser from Chrome to Opera Mini. Now, I see that move paid off in ways that one would not expect. InMobi should be prosecuted, not just fined. Such a pussy move by the regulators.